This book is concerned with understanding variations in the processes and outcomes of public policies and services. The focus is, however, a very specific one. Although ‘large’ questions of policy change and development are touched on in a number of the chapters, the primary focus of the book is not on the macro level, that is, on the attempted and actual transformations in the purposes and outcomes of the various services of the welfare state or in the relationships between the state and its citizens. We are not examining, for example, the capacity of public services to achieve social justice or well-being among citizens, nor to ensure safety and social cohesion within diverse communities. Rather, the principal concern addressed here is what happens to produce particular kinds of outcomes at the micro level of interactions between different individuals and groups in a variety of policy development and service delivery contexts. The focus has been on the way in which both officials charged with the delivery of policy and those citizens and service users who are the focus of policy intervention negotiate and shape processes of decision making, and thus what constitutes policy in practice. We have sought to open up the question of ‘what happens’ when these interactions occur through the idea of ‘subversion’.

It is important to emphasise that the analyses and case studies in this book do not identify subversion as a heroic, revolutionary or necessarily even conscious act deliberately intended to undermine a particular purpose or outcome of public policy. Rather, from careful analysis of what actually goes on when front-line workers interact with service users, when citizens and officials come together in spaces designed for policy deliberation, when policy makers attempt to characterise particular groups within the population for policy action – the contributors identify subversion as an almost inevitable aspect of the policy process. However, this does not mean that subversion is always devoid of normative content. In many of the analyses presented here, it is identified as capable of generating consequences that, in normative terms, may be viewed as either progressive or regressive. Thus, there are examples of action by both workers and service users that is intended to promote elements of social justice by countering the perceived stigmatising, victimising, exploitative or undemocratic effects of official policies.